The Chilling Case of Mary McLaughlin

[00:00:17]Mary Ann McLaughlin was born in Glasgow in approximately 1926.

[00:00:23]1926 was a year of profound turbulence in Britain.

[00:00:29]It was the year of the general strike, the largest and most significant industrial action in British history, when nearly 2 million workers across the country downed tools in solidarity with the miners who had been told their wages would be cut and their hours extended.

[00:00:49]In Glasgow, as in every industrial city in Britain, the strike was felt deeply.

[00:00:57]The city had always been a place of organized labor, of working people who understood their collective power and were not afraid to use it.

[00:01:08]The Clyde shipyards, the steel works, the factories, all of them fell silent for 9 days in May of that year.

[00:01:17]The strike was eventually called off by the Trades Union Congress, leaving the miners to fight alone [music] and ultimately lose.

[00:01:25]But the spirit of solidarity that had driven it did not disappear.

[00:01:31]It was woven into the fabric of Glasgow, into the communities, the streets, the families, in ways that would define the city for generations.

[00:01:42]It was into this Glasgow, proud, working-class, and shaped by the experience of collective struggle, that Mary Ann McLaughlin was born.

[00:01:53]She was a mother of 11 children, a grandmother of 26, and a great-grandmother.

[00:02:00]She had lived in Glasgow her entire life, raised her family there, built her life there, and by the autumn of 1984, was living alone in a third-floor flat at Crathie Court on Laurel Street in Partick, in the West End of the city.

[00:02:18]Crathie Court was a building with a particular history.

[00:02:23]Completed in 1952 and designed by Ray Bradbury, Glasgow's director of housing, it had been the first high-rise public housing project built in the city.

[00:02:36]A prototype of the kind of housing that Glasgow believed would solve its urgent need to clear its slums and re-house its people.

[00:02:45]It was a Grade B listed building.

[00:02:49]It had been built with optimism. By 1984, it was simply where Mary lived.

[00:02:55]Mary was sociable and warm. She went out with friends to the local pubs in the evenings.

[00:03:01]She played dominoes. She joked with the staff at Armando's chip shop on Dumbarton Road, where she was a regular.

[00:03:10]She was a grandmother of 26 and a great-grandmother.

[00:03:14]She had built a large, vivid life in those streets over many decades. Her son, Martin Cullen, was 24 years old in 1984.

[00:03:25]He visited her weekly at the flat on Laurel Street.

[00:03:30]He later said his mother had seemed afraid in the month before her death.

[00:03:35]Whatever she had been afraid of, she did not tell him.

[00:03:39]1984 was one of the most difficult years in modern British history.

[00:03:46]The miners' strike, which would last a full year, had begun in March of that year, pitting the mining communities of Britain against a government determined to close the pits.

[00:03:59]In Scotland, as in Wales and the north of England, the strike tore through communities that depended on the coal industry for their survival.

[00:04:10]Glasgow itself was in the grip of a wider deindustrialization that was destroying the economic foundations the city had been built on.

[00:04:20]The Clyde shipyards, once the greatest shipbuilding center in the world, producing vessels that sailed every ocean, were in terminal decline.

[00:04:32]Factory after factory was closing.

[00:04:36]Unemployment had reached levels not seen since the 1930s.

[00:04:41]The communities of the West End of Glasgow, Partick among them, felt the strain of all of this.

[00:04:49]These were tight working-class neighborhoods where people had always depended on each other, where the pub and the chip shop and the street corner were the social infrastructure of daily life.

[00:05:04]It was in this Glasgow, under pressure, uncertain, but stubbornly communal, that Mary Ann McLaughlin spent the last weeks of her life.

[00:05:15]On the evening of Thursday, the 26th of September, 1984, Mary went out with friends.

[00:05:24]She spent the evening drinking and playing dominoes at the Hyndland Pub on Hyndland Street, a pub that looks out onto Mansfield Park.

[00:05:34]She was last seen leaving at around 10:45 in the evening.

[00:05:40]She called into Armando's chip shop on Dumbarton Road on her way home.

[00:05:44]She bought fritters and cigarettes and joked with the staff as she always did.

[00:05:50]A short time later, she encountered a man named Graham McGill.

[00:05:55]McGill ended up back at her flat at Crathy Court.

[00:05:59]What happened there was described by the prosecution at trial as a brutal attack.

[00:06:06]Graham McGill strangled Mary Ann McLaughlin with the cord of her own dressing gown, winding it around her neck three times.

[00:06:15]He stole a set of keys from her flat.

[00:06:18]He then left and returned to the prison from which he had been released on day release that day.

[00:06:26]Mary was 58 years old.

[00:06:29]For 6 days, nobody knew she was dead. On the 2nd of October, 1984, Martin Cullen went to visit his mother at Crathy Court as he did every week. He arrived with his ex-partner, June Brittle, and his child. When he reached the door of the flat, he noticed something wrong immediately.

[00:06:51]The hall light was on. His mother never left the hall light on. Then came the smell through the letterbox.

[00:06:58]Martin later described it to the court at trial as the most horrible smell you will smell in your life.

[00:07:05]He knocked. He shouted through the door.

[00:07:08]He tried a key borrowed from a neighbor.

[00:07:11]It did not work. He kicked the door in.

[00:07:14]June Brittle went inside. She came out screaming. Martin went to the end of the hall. He said he could not go any further.

[00:07:23]He called an ambulance and the police.

[00:07:26]The post-mortem examination established that Mary had been dead for at least 5 days before her son found her. The investigation that followed was major and extensive. Dozens of lines of inquiry were pursued across Glasgow and beyond.

[00:07:43]Despite all of it, no one was identified as being responsible for Mary's death.

[00:07:48]The case went cold.

[00:07:50]What the police did not know in 1984, what they could not have known, was that the man who had killed Maryann McLaughlin had walked out of a prison that morning on day release and returned to his cell in the early hours of the following morning. A governor's logbook would one day confirm this.

[00:08:11]The man's name [music] was Graham McGill. He had been 22 years old.

[00:08:16]In April 1981, he'd been convicted of assault with intent to rape [music] and rape and had been sentenced to prison.

[00:08:26]He was serving that sentence and was on parole the night he walked into Mary's life and killed her.

[00:08:33]When it was over, he went back to his cell before morning.

[00:08:37]He did not feature in the 1984 investigation.

[00:08:42]His name was not known to the officers who were searching for Mary's killer.

[00:08:46]The evidence from the scene had been carefully preserved. Items were stored in paper bags, sealed and kept through the years and then the decades.

[00:08:58]The officers and scientists who gathered that evidence in October 1984 did not know about DNA profiling.

[00:09:07]They could not have known what those items might one day yield, but they kept them.

[00:09:14]Five attempts were made to find answers in the evidence.

[00:09:18]The original examination in 1984 was inconclusive.

[00:09:23]Cold case reviews followed in 1999, in 2002, and in 2006.

[00:09:30]Each time the science was not yet advanced enough to produce a result.

[00:09:35]Then in 2014, a fifth and final review was undertaken by forensic scientist Joanne Cockran and her colleague Negian at the Scottish Police Authority Forensic Services Cold Case Review Team at the Scottish Crime Campus.

[00:09:52]Joanne Cockran led the examination of the preserved items.

[00:09:57]She later said of the case, "There are some murders that stay with you.

[00:10:02]Mary's murder is one of the more disturbing cold cases that I've dealt with."

[00:10:08]She said of the preserved evidence, "They didn't know about DNA profiling at that time.

[00:10:15]They couldn't possibly have known the value that it might have had."

[00:10:20]Cockran and her team worked through the items preserved from the scene 30 years earlier.

[00:10:27]A cigarette end recovered from Mary's flat provided the first breakthrough.

[00:10:32]DNA analysis produced a profile.

[00:10:36]Then, hidden inside the knot of the dressing gown cord that had been tied around Mary's neck, preserved within that knot for 30 years, a matching DNA profile was found.

[00:10:48]DNA was also recovered from Mary's dress and from a black bra found at the scene.

[00:10:55]The chances of the DNA on the dress belonging to anyone other than the same individual were estimated at 1 in a billion.

[00:11:03]The breakthrough initially baffled detectives.

[00:11:07]The prime suspect the DNA had identified appeared to have been a prisoner in Edinburgh at the time of the murder.

[00:11:15]It was the governor's logbook that resolved the contradiction.

[00:11:19]Graham McGill had been on day release.

[00:11:22]He had returned to his cell within hours of leaving Mary's flat in the early hours of the 27th of September 1984.

[00:11:32]McGill was arrested on the 4th of December 2019.

[00:11:38]He was 59 years old.

[00:11:41]In the years since Mary's murder, he had gone on to commit further serious sexual offenses.

[00:11:47]In 1999, he was convicted of assault with intent to rape and received a discretionary life sentence.

[00:11:55]He was released on life license in October 2008 and had no further convictions between that release and his arrest for Mary's murder.

[00:12:06]He was in employment at the time of his arrest.

[00:12:10]McGill's trial took place at the High Court in Glasgow over 4 days. The prosecution was led by Alex Prentice QC.

[00:12:20]McGill was defended by Sarah Livingston.

[00:12:22]He denied both the murder and the theft of the keys from Mary's flat.

[00:12:27]>> [music] >> The jury heard the DNA evidence presented by Joanne Cockran. They heard Martin Cullen describe arriving at his mother's flat on the 2nd of October 1984.

[00:12:38]The hall light burning, the smell through the letterbox, kicking the door in, June Brittle coming out screaming, standing at the end of the hall unable to go any further. On the 9th of April 2021, 37 years after Mary's murder, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of guilty on both charges.

[00:13:02]It had taken them just over 2 hours.

[00:13:05]McGill was sentenced at the High Court in Aberdeen in May 2021.

[00:13:11]Lord Burns addressed him directly.

[00:13:14]He said, "36 years after the death of Mary McLaughlin, you have been convicted of her murder. She was 58 when she died and you were 22. You are now 59. Her family has had to wait all that time in order to discover who was responsible. Lord Burns sentenced McGill to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 14 years.

[00:13:41]Martin Cullen spoke after the verdict.

[00:13:44]He said, "There is no joy at the verdict, but there is justice, and my mom can finally rest in peace." He said it had been years of torture for everyone in the family, and that there was a sense of relief. He said of McGill, "He is a revolting individual, and it brings some comfort to think that he will never again see anywhere other than the inside of a prison."

[00:14:11]In the years before the conviction, Martin had said, "All that I want is the person caught."

[00:14:18]This has been praying on my mind since 1984, and that's way too long.

[00:14:23]It never goes away.

[00:14:25]I found my mom, and then had to go to the city mortuary to identify her body.

[00:14:31]Hello everyone. Thank you for listening, and drop any feedback below. I would love to hear your thoughts, and hope to see you again right here on Cold Case UK.